Shut your PC up by removing fans

About a year ago, I decided to see if I could quiet down my desktop machine a little bit.  It's a home-grown 2.6 GHz Pentium 4 box.  I'd already added a low-noise Antec power supply, low-noise case fan and low-noise Seagate hard drives.  The thing was still too loud.  The next point of attack was the CPU fan.  P4s tend to ship with noisy fans, and mine was no exception.  I bought a Zalman CNPS7000-AlCu CPU cooler, and that helped a lot, but there was _still_ too much noise (!??!).

I broke out the stethoscope (non-geeks call these empty paper towel rolls) and isolated the problem.  It was the tiny fan on my aging ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon card.  Per some suggestions I found online, I applied a drop of 3-in-1 oil to the fan's bearings.  This shut it up for about a day.  I dediced that I'd try my luck without the fan.  There was a decent heat sink glued to the graphics chip and the case had good airflow.  Plus, I figured that if I toasted the card, it'd be a good excuse to go shopping.  A year later, it's still chugging away just fine.  I even used it to capture video a few times, and it didn't overheat.  I wonder if some vendors are including fans on GPUs that don't really need them in order to make them 'look' faster - kind of like the non-functional hood scoops on some cars.

A couple of months ago, the box started whining again.  It was the motherboard chipset fan this time.  Again, it had a heat sink glued to it, so I just removed the fan.  I also rerouted some cables and moved add-in cards around to maximize airflow.  All has been well ever since.  This really doesn't surprise me.  The motherboard, an Abit IS7, was designed to work in a variety of case configurations.  In a clutterred case with poor airflow, that little fan might be necessary.

Randomly removing fans certainly isn't a universal solution.  Running a P4 without a fan will cause a system shutdown within seconds.  Fast, modern GPUs usually require active cooling, too.  For many secondary components, however, I think it's all about airflow.  If cool air is being moved through the case efficiently, some components that ship with fans might not need them.

As with anything, your mileage may vary.  Hardware tweaks can cause components to fail.  This risk must be balanced against the benefits of the tweak.

Comments

[Mark]

Hey John,

Yeah, those little ones really crank out the decibels, don't they? I'd bought a passive Zalman heatsink for the mobo Northbridge, but the attachment mechanism wasn't compatible w/my mobo verson. I thought about using my Dremel to whittle it down to fit and attaching it w/silver epoxy, but going 'sans heatsink' has seemed to work OK for me so far (fingers crossed).

I was looking into acoustic dampening padding, but I was concerned that it would also act as thermal insulation. Maybe not, with good airflow...

[John Samolyk]

Hey Mark,

I went through all this with a few of my PCs a couple years ago. I also found that the small fans (e.g. video card and chipset fans) were the screamers. I didn't just take the fans off, I replaced the heatsinks with more efficient passive headsinks.

I've also played around with the rubber and foam sound deadening/absorbing materials, but found that the most bang for your buck is getting rid of the little fans and getting a good CPU Heatsink/Fan.

-j